My Papers

Brain Drain/Brain Gain in Art, Science and Technology

The ISEA Education Workshop, led by Nina Czegledy in collaboration with Paul Thomas on behalf of the Leonardo Education and Art Forum and Tanfer Emin Tunc, Elif Ayter, Murat Germen, Selim Balcisoy of Turkey, will take place during the 17th conference of the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts (ISEA) at Sabanci Center (Istanbul) 2.00 pm on Friday, September 16, 2011.

The ISEA Education Workshop, led by Nina Czegledy (czegledy [at] interlog.com) in collaboration with Paul Thomas on behalf of the Leonardo Education and Art Forum and Tanfer Emin Tunc, Elif Ayter, Murat Germen, Selim Balcisoy of Turkey, will take place during the 17th conference of the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts (ISEA) at Sabanci Center (Istanbul) 2.00 pm on Friday, September 16, 2011.

Welcome:

Julianne Pierce, chair, ISEA International, Lanfranco Aceti, Artistic Director and Conference Chair, ISEA2011 Andrea Polli, Artistic Director, ISEA 2012 Paul Thomas, international representative, (LEAF) Patricia Olynyk, chair, Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF) The organizers of ISEA2011 are inviting the Turkish and the international academic community to participate in the ISEA Education Workshop and the LEAF Workshop. The ISEA2011 Education Workshop on the theme of “brain drain/brain gain in art, science and technology” will provide the opportunity for engagement between local and international academics, foster personal links and research synergies, as well as provide the chance for young academics to gain contacts in these fields. In the ISEA2011 Education Workshop the identification and discussion of specific key educational issues initiates the open exchange between educational experts and workshop participants. As the changes in economic and cultural landscapes are transforming consolidated realities - artists, scientists and academics that work at the intersection of art, science and technology around the world are adopting new strategies and models of production. Who is gaining from these transformations and who is losing from them? Can Turkey be listed amongst the contemporary winners of these developments? Between other issues affecting contemporary education we will focus on issues of interdisciplinarity and courses available in Turkey and internationally at the intersection of art, science and technology exploring their innovative methodologies. ISEA looks at the Education Workshops as an opportunity for established and young academics to develop new contacts and to foster new synergies both nationally and internationally.

Bios of the Presenters

Elif Ayiter

Elif Ayiter is a designer, educator and researcher from Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, where she develops hybrid educational methodologies between art and science and participates in multidisciplinary research in Visual Communication Design and Computer Sciences, particularly in the area of data visualization. Her texts have been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Consciousness Studies, D'Ars and Technoetic Arts and she has contributed chapters to books in her area. She has presented creative as well as research output at conferences including Siggraph, Creativity and Cognition, SPIE, ISEA, Computational Aesthetics, Cyberworlds and AACE. She is also the chief editor of the journal Metaverse Creativity published by Intellect Journals, UK and is currently a doctoral student at the at the University of Plymouth under the supervision of Roy Ascott.

Selim Balcisoy

Selim Balcisoy obtained his BS in Electronic Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH) in 1996. He received his PhD in Computer Science with his dissertation Analysis and Development of Interaction Techniques between Real and Synthetic Worlds in 2001 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Between 2001 and 2004, he was a Senior Research Engineer at Nokia Research Center USA, where he conducted research on mobile graphics. His research interests include Augmented Reality, Virtual Environments, Cultural Heritage and Mobile Graphics. Dr. Balcisoy has (co)authored over 30 publications in refereed international journals and conference proceedings, and has been granted one US patent. Dr. Balcisoy joined Sabanci University's Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences in 2004 and where he has established the Computer Graphics Laboratory (CGL).

Dimitris Charitos

Dimitris Charitos is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Athens. His artistic work involves electronic music, audiovisual, interactive, site-specific installations, and virtual environments. He has studied architectural design, computer-aided design and has a PhD in interactive design and virtual environments. He has authored or co-authored more than 70 publications in books, journals or conference proceedings.

Nina Czegledy

Nina Czegledy, media artist, curator and educator, works internationally on collaborative art and science/technology projects, as well as in education. She has led, or been a key contributor to, numerous education workshops, forums and festivals around the world. Czegledy has published widely in books and journals and has presented at several international conferences and academic institutions. Current art projects include Aura/Aurora (2010, 2011) a collaborative interactive audio-visual environment, and Visual Collider (2009-2011 with Marcus Neustetter). Recent curatorial projects include: The Pleasure of Light, co-curated with Rona Kopeczky, Ludwig Museum Budapest 2010, Gdanks 2011; co-curator 3rd Quadrilateral Biennial (Rijeka Croatia 2009) Device Art in Budapest (Hungary 2009); co-curator e-mobile Art, the European Mobile Lab 2007-2009 (an EU project); and organizing team member for SCANZ 2011 Eco Sapiens (New Plymouth, New Zealand 2011). She is also Senior Fellow at KMDI (Knowledge Media Design Institute) at the University of Toronto; Adjunct Associate Professor Concordia University, Montreal; Senior Fellow, Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest; contributing editor to the Leonardo Electronic Almanac; Research Fellow, Intercreate Org., New Zealand; and member of the Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et des Techno-Sciences scientific committee.

Murat Germen

Murat Germen is an artist/architect using photography as an expression/research tool. He has an MArch degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he went as a Fulbright scholar and received an AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for academic excellence. He has exhibited in over forty inter/national venues (including Turkey, USA, Italy, Germany, UK, Mexico, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Greece, Japan, Russia, Iran, India, France, Canada, Bahrain) and is represented by CAM Gallery in Turkey and ARTITLED in the Netherlands and Belgium. He is currently a professor of photography and multimedia design at Sabanci University in Istanbul.

Erik Mortenson

Erik Mortenson is an Assistant Professor at Koc University in Istanbul who specializes in American literature and culture. His first book, Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (from Southern Illinois UP), examines the moment as one of the primary motifs of Beat Generation writing. Placing an expanded Beat canon in an early postmodern context, Mortenson highlights the Beat contributions to American poetics and outlines the effects of gender and race on Beat writing in the postwar years. His current book project explores the image of the shadow as it is deployed in 1950s cinema, literature, photography, and television.

Paul Thomas

Paul Thomas has a joint position as the Head of Painting at the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales and Head of Creative Technologies at Curtin University of Technology at the Associate Professor rank. He is currently co-curating The World Is Everything That Is The Case for ISEA 2011. Paul has been working in the area of electronic arts since 1981 when he co-founded the group Media-Space. Media-Space was part of the first global link up with artists connected to ARTEX. From 1981-1986, the group was involved in a number of collaborative exhibitions and was instrumental in the establishment a substantial body of research. Paul's current research project Nanoessence explores the space between life and death at the nano level. The project is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Nanochemistry Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology and SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia. Paul is also a practicing electronic artist whose work has exhibited internationally.

Tanfer Emin Tunc

Tanfer Emin Tunc is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. She received her BA, MA and PhD in United States History, and an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and specializes in women's studies and the history of American medicine, science and technology. Dr. Tunc is the editor of three volumes of critical essays and the author of two books and over 70 journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, and reference book entries. Her work has appeared in internationally-renowned publications such as Rethinking History, Asian Journal of Women's Studies, Foreign Literature Studies, Women's History Review, Historical Journal and Journal of Women's History. She is also Lead Editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies' Special Forum on Asian American Studies: "Redefining the American in Asian American Studies: Transnationalism, Diaspora and Representation" (Fall 2011). Dr. Tunc is currently on the peer review board of six interdisciplinary journals; Secretary of the American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT); and on the Executive Board of Hacettepe University's Women's Research and Implementation Center (HUWRIC), which operates under the auspices of the Faculty of Medicine. Her current book project is THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN IN AMERICAN STUDIES: TURKEY AND THE UNITED STATES (Forthcoming, Peter Lang Publishing, 2012).